The information available from individuals and enterprises has grown dramatically in both complexity and volume in recent years. As a consequence, it is increasingly difficult to provide and organize this ever-growing wealth of information. To address this, a multitude of tools have been developed to organize information, e.g., hashtags, hyperlinks, distributed file systems, etc.
While these tools may provide users with a large database of information, they are limited in functionality and scalability. For example, several of the platforms merely provide the users with a pool of unorganized and broad tags which users must manually search. Other platforms only allow users to discover information based on the source of the information. Overall, these platforms do not provide a manner in which users of the system may easily discover arbitrarily-defined pools of information as soon as the information is published. The users' ability to find particular items of information on these platforms becomes more frustrated as the amount and complexity of information expands over time. This is especially challenging for some platforms that require the manual tagging of information before that information is made available to users.
Accordingly, there is a need for improved methods and apparatus for information organization and exchange that allow users to easily discover and share real-time sets of arbitrarily-organized information across applications.